the whitney

In Los Angeles, the battle between Chicano anti-gentrification activists and gallerists in Boyle Heights continues to escalate. Maybe they should just team up to fight for something like New York’s proposed Small Business Jobs Survival Act together? [NPR]

CNN hires veteran sketch artist William J. Hennessy Jr. to record press briefings now that cameras are no longer allowed. They should hire Molly Crabapple to do some work for them too. [artnet News]

Talking Pictures opens today at the Met. For the exhibition, curators asked six pairs of artists to communicate with one another by sending photos from their smartphones back and forth. The show comprises records of that exchange in various formats. It seems kinda silly. [The Verge]

Sarah Douglas at ARTnews offers a recent history of gallery closings. The list does a good job at providing an overview of what’s happening in the industry and refutes the gallerist argument that these closures simply reflect the fact that there are too many galleries in operation. It’s not like these were bad galleries that didn’t make it because they were bad at the game, somehow. These were great galleries and businesses, often in operation for more than a decade, that should have been able to make it work. The business for lower tier galleries may not be sustainable. [ARTnews]

A lot of Alexander Calder’s sculptures and mobiles are meant to move, so they need to handled to make that happen. As such, The Whitney has hired “activators” for its new Calder show and the Times has a new feature showing them in motion. SO. COOL. [The New York Times]

Curbed provides an exhaustive account of just why Penn Station sucks so much and why this is going to be the “Summer of Hell” for commuters passing through. [Curbed]

Tarot card reader Maria Pilar Abel Martínez claims Salvador Dalí is her father and has taken the estate to court to prove it. No big deal except the court, siding with Martinez, ordered Dali’s dead body exhumed so a paternity test could be administered. If she is proven to be the heiress she would be entitled to a portion of the estate. The estate is expected to appeal. [Hyperallergic]

Magazzino, or “warehouse” in Italian, has joined the ranks of museums in the Hudson River Valley. It’s the brainchild of collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, and will showcase works from their collection of Arte Povera works from postwar Italy. [The Art Newspaper]

This week starts off and ends a little slowly, but Wednesday to Friday ought to be pretty great. Spend your hump-day checking out openings at Marianne Boesky Gallery and David Lewis, where a group show and a solo show by painter Megan Marrin, respectively, look to have a much-needed sense of humor. Thursday night Condo New York kicks-off, […]

I (Michael) don’t think I have ever been as emotionally invested in a piece of pop culture in my adult life as I have been watching the Netflix original Sense8. The show, from the Wachowskis, felt like the first site-specific artwork for the era of streaming—like watching eight addicting films from different genres at the same time in different tabs. It’s pretty heartbreaking that Netflix has inexplicably cancelled the show after two very well received seasons. In a real-world sociopolitical context increasingly defined by nationalism and bitter identity politics, a narrative that is essentially an epic morality play about global empathy—and individuals skill sharing to face repression in their respective societies—felt urgent beyond binge-worthiness. [the Internet: #RenewSense8 #SaveSense8 ]

Central St Martins grad student Camila Gonzalez Corea has been transforming images of topless women into emoji collages to protest Instagram’s censorship of female nipples. According to Instagram, it’s fine to show nipples if they belong to men. The Nipple Act bypasses this problem by replacing pixels with icons. [Metro]

68 Mayors are resisting Trump’s withdraw from the Paris climate accord and have pledged to uphold the agreements. New York is among them, and lit landmarks in green lights to show support for the international initiative. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former mayor is co-ordinating the effort, and is negotiating with the United Nations to have its submission accepted alongside contributions to the deal by other nations. Bloomberg Philanthropies is offering to donate 14 million to help fund the deal’s budget. [Curbed]

Construction has started on “Ruby City”, a glittery red art museum David Adjaye has designed for the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio. For a building that is literally covered in glitter and painted bright red, it’s oddly understated. [Dezeen]

Another Renzo Piano museum that resembles a pharmaceutical giant’s depot has opened, this time in Harlem. Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, nestled inside Piano’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, launches their inaugural show, “Uptown”, which is a triennial that includes well known artists such as Sanford Biggers, Nari Ward and Julie Mehretu along with emerging talent like John Pinderhughes and Alicia Grullón. Critic Jason Farago says it’s a pretty good show, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot to say about it. The most interest nugget in the review isn’t about the art but the fact that the Gallery partnered with other local museums to produce the show—a peace offering of sorts due to the gentrifying forces the University’s expansion brings. [The New York Times]

Sarah Cascone interviews Emma Sulkowicz about her strange S&M performance “The Ship Is Sinking” at the Whitney. Inspired by politics, Bertolt Brecht, beauty pageants, and figureheads on shipwrecks (among other references) it basically comprised a man dressed as “Mr Whitney” tying her to a piece of wood and torturing her. I have read the interview and I’m still not sure I (Michael) “get it”. [artnet News]

Ai Weiwei is posing as Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian refugee toddler, for a second time. Because it wasn’t a bad enough idea the first time around. In this picture he’s lying face down on his porcelain sunflower seeds—apparently it is a response to Donald Trump’s visit to the Israel Museum last week. The museum covered some of his works when the president visited—which it is now claiming it did because they were not fully installed. Whatever the case, can Ai Weiwei just let this toddler rest in peace already? [The Art Newspaper]

Here’s an interview with DoLab, the lighting team/curators who do the visuals for festivals such as Coachella. Their work sounds like a logistics minefield. [Variety]

The Shia LaBeouf saga continues. After the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens kicked LaBeouf’s anti-Trump installation “HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US”, the actor/artist relocated the piece to the El Rey Theater in Albuquerque New Mexico. It’s already back up and running. [Independent Journal Review]

From rehangs at the Whitney and MoMA to The Brooklyn Museum’s #J20 programming, Andrea K. Scott rounds-up how New York’s museums are protesting the Trump administration. [The New Yorker]

Karen Pence wants to use her new position as “Second Lady” to raise awareness about the benefits of art therapy. One would imagine that after decades of marriage to Mike Pence, she must be a therapy connoisseur. [PBS]

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer opposes Bill de Blasio’s “mansion tax”, which would add a 2.5% sales tax to homes over $2 million to fund much-needed affordable housing. That’s because the vast majority of New York City’s priciest property sales are in her borough, unsurprisingly. She claims this puts an unfair burden on Manhattanites. But aren’t so many $2+ million sales investment properties for foreign buyers of pied-a-tierres for the globe-trotting ultra-rich? If anything, the tax might have the additional benefit of cooling the luxury market slightly, which would be a boon for most actual Manhattan residents. If you live in Manhattan, it might be worth giving her office a call. [Curbed]

Kota Ezawa has installed his illustration-like reproductions of missing paintings from the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist at the museum. These are surprisingly lovely. [artnet News]

Miami’s once-scrappy Borscht Film Festival turns 10 this week, and is now a fully-grown-up institution… sort of. They’re celebrating with all kinds of hijinks from a viking funeral to a jetski parade. This would be an excellent time to schedule a last-minute Miami trip. [The Miami Herald]

Bad And Nasty is planning a “Not My President’s Day” of art and activism across the country. In Baltimore, for example, protest/activities/performances are planned across several blocks of the Station North Arts District. [Facebook]

For everyone who has complained that the art world is too apolitical in the past month or so, take note of how 2017 is kicking off. We have a week of feminist exhibitions, the start of a month-long project about Trump’s America Saturday at Petzel Gallery, and shows that tackle topics from water contamination to the holocaust and the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Welcome to the art world in the Trump era. If the list of participants at Petzel’s event is any indication, the big guns are coming out.

Helen Marten has won the 2016 Turner Prize for her assemblage sculptures. This win seems to be attracting more criticism than normal. ARTnews editor Andrew Russeth took to twitter to say Anthea Hamilton was robbed. And on the conservative end of things, British MP Michael Rove complained that Marten’s work did not live up to the prize’s name. [Hyperallergic]

Oh man. Artsy landed an interview with Ivanka Trump (Update: The post is from three years ago.). Nominally, the point was to ask her about her art collection. (She likes Cy Twombly and Christopher Wool, and a bunch of young male artists too—Wade Guyton, Nate Lowman, Alex Israel, Dan Colen, Joe Bradley). The larger point of the interview seems to be brand schilling. She fluffs up the Artsy name, which she claims democratizes art thanks to the accessibility of masterpieces and then talks about her new lifestyle brand projects. “There is a lot of synergy between the Ivanka Trump brand and the Trump Organization and our goal is to continue to enhance that for the consumer.” [Artsy]

Andrew Uroskie review of Chrissie Iles “Dreamlands” exhibition at the Whitney is a bit hard to follow, but there are some smart nuggets. For example, he sees the show as an attempt to test cinema’s transformation of modern perception and subjectivity and identifies three enduring themes: the dissolution of a sense of place, the changing character of documentation, and the transformation of the self through the creation of alternate phantasmatic realities. [4columns]

A fire in an Oakland warehouse killed at least 36 people, many of them artists. The artists were occupying the building illegally and there’s been some speculation that the blast may have been started by an electrical fire. The residents had been priced out of the San Francisco Bay area. [The New York Times]

Listen to Hrag Vartanian’s three part series on Standing Rock, where thousands of water protectors and their allies have congregated to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. [Hyperallergic]

This is handy: A holiday tipping guide for your building staff. [Curbed]

Photos and a report from Times Square last night. “I don’t let the media dictate anything in my life,” said 32-year-old Trump supporter Tonye-D’mitrias Vickers. That sentiment may explain why getting only one endorsement from a major newspaper didn’t kill Trump’s chances. [Gothamist]

Lucia Moholy, wife of László Moholy-Nagy, is pretty much the unsung hero of the Bauhaus. While her husband taught at the school, she took gorgeous documentary photographs of everything from architecture to student-designed teacups. These negatives were left behind when she was forced to flee the Nazis, and Walter Gropius ended up using them to promote the school’s design philosophy while the campus remained occupied, first by the Nazis and then behind the Iron Curtain. She was often not credited. [99% Invisible]

Why is unnaturally (and obnoxiously) cheery travel vlogger Louis Cole now making bizarre North Korean propaganda? This batch of extremely weird vlogs look like what a British person would make if a North Korean agent forced them at gunpoint to do “hip” things…based on a North Korean perspective of what’s cool in the West, based on smuggled DVDs of South Korean media. Sick beats, bro! Skateboarding! Water parks! Dreadlocks! Human rights abuses?! [Vanity Fair]

Gary Nader and Jorge Perez are currently feuding over who gets to build a museum in Miami or who’s dick is bigger or something. [artnet News]

There’s more single people than ever before, and now social scientists are trying to figure out how to start studying this previously neglected category of people. [The Science of Us]

Q: Why are academics such bad writers? A: Part I and Part II. [The Awl]

Here’s the first aerial photo of Manhattan, taken from a hot air balloon in 1906. Now that we’re so accustomed to ubiquitous crystal-clear satellite imagery it’s hard to imagine just how crazy this must’ve been just 110 years ago. [Curbed]

We’re looking forward to Chrissie Iles’s Dreamlands exhibition, a survey of immersive moving image works over the last century, opening at the Whitney this fall. In an interview with Sloan Science and Film, she gives a preview of the exhibition, and discusses the relationships between art made in Weimar-era Germany and today. Hint: it has something to do with cyborgs. [e-flux Conversations]

Photo filters have gone passé, it seems, now that augmented reality are taking over apps. Still, here comes Prism, an app that lets you apply so-called art filters like “Impression” or “Urban” to your phone pics; the app has the Mercury News speculating that “fine art may be the next career killed by the internet.” We doubt the latter on so many levels. [Mercury News]

A visitor to SFMOMA tripped and fell in into Andy Warhol’s “Triple Elvis [Ferus Type].” The museum estimates damage was minimal, but it’s been removed from display and is being evaluated by conservators. [The Los Angeles Times]

Ugo Rondinone’s “Seven Magic Mountains,” a public sculpture comprising stacked, brightly-painted boulders, has been vandalized. It’s installed in the desert outside of Las Vegas, and predictably, someone drew a dick on it, in addition to “666” and the text “HELLA SPIDER”, whatever that means. [artnet News]

Did the Louvre do something to piss of the Old Testament God? Just after the record-breaking floodwaters receded away from the museum, a fire broke out at a construction site on the block. The museum is planning to reopen tomorrow, pending no earthquakes or plagues of locusts. [The Telegraph]

The town of Elgin, Illinois, has removed the Dave Powers mural “American Nocturne” from public view and into an indoor cultural center. The mural depicts a lynch mob, but was on display for about a decade before it was deemed too offensive for outdoor display. [Blogging Censorship]

Gilbert & George, the controversy-courting queer art pioneers, are opening a nonprofit art center in the East London neighborhood where they’ve lived and worked since 1969. [The Art Newspaper]

Charles Schwab has closed artist Sarah Meyohas’ account because of illegal market manipulation. Meyohas had purchased stocks and sold them in front of an audience as a performance. She then painted the fluctuations in stock prices caused in part by her transactions. [Observer]

Wow. Florence Nightingale was quite the graphic designer. The famous nurse was an avid statistician and created data visualizations to impact health policies: “to affect thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.” [Open Culture]

A group of artists staged The Fung Wah Biennial on a bus travelling up and down the East Coast. The event was a nostalgic look back at the most infamous (and now defunct) of the Chinatown busses. [NPR]

Ian Volner wrote was has to be the most lovingly detailed account of the Met Breuer’s renovations. [New Republic]

Applications are open for the Lumen Prize, which rewards digital artists with up to $3,000 in cash and a travelling exhibition. [The Lumen Prize]

Charges against Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who lit the door of a government office building on fire, have been changed from “ideologically-motivated” vandalism to “damaging a cultural heritage site”. [Artforum]

Greene Naftali is opening a temporary exhibition space at 227 Leonard St in Williamsburg. They’re opening with a solo show from Lutz Bacher on April 8th. [ART News]

The Seven Best Restaurants in the world according to Vogue include two New York picks: M. Wells at PS1 MoMA (overrated IMO—too many innards) and UNTITLED at the Whitney (underrated IMO—out of this world fried chicken and carrots). The list doesn’t include one of my personal favorites, SMAK, at Malmo Konsthall. Best meringue I’ve eaten. Ever. [Vogue]

Add David Lynch to the list of celebrities supporting Bernie Sanders. [Twitter]